Delta

United Kingdom

An edible or water soluble sachet solution for restaurants and other hospitality businesses.

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Circular Design Challenge winner

Category 2: Redesigning sachets

Delta, from the United Kingdom, offers a compact technology that allows restaurants to make and serve sauces in edible and compostable sachets.

How does this innovation accelerate the transition to a circular economy?

The Delta team has created an edible sachet into which condiment sauces, for example, can be packaged when they arrive in bulk at a restaurant. This enables the sauces to be transported efficiently and economically right up to the point of sale. Should the packaging leak into the environment, it will rapidly compost. As a bonus, the packaging material is derived from seaweed, which captures CO2 as it grows.

What’s new?

The sachet has a shape that allows easy handling and stacking into secondary packaging, and can have varied thickness and number of layers depending on its purpose. What matters more is the innovative business model in the form of a service solution that puts a machine on clients’ premises. The machine produces the packaging close to the customer, and fills it with what the client wants, be it ketchup for a fast food restaurant or shampoo for a hotelier. Since all edible films have poor barrier properties, this approach is a necessity to avoid the problem of short shelf-life. A licensing model can ensure fast roll-out and customisation of solutions to different brands and applications.

3 questions for the team

Rodrigo Gonzalez

Co-founder and Co-CEO

What led you to come up with this idea?

Delta is an evolution of our previous product (Ooho!). We were originally inspired by the way nature encapsulates liquids using membranes, from egg yolks to cells or fruits. We investigated old food technology, such as spherification for making fake caviar, and started the project whilst at Imperial College London by applying those techniques to packaging. We’ve been working for three years as a startup to bring the technology to the manufacturing stage.

Many others are proposing edible solutions for condiments and other products, but the shelf life is just not long enough. What makes your idea stand out?

Delta’s technology is based on local manufacturing. Our compact machines produce sachets daily, directly at the point of sale to lower the supply chain requirements for a natural material.

What excites you the most about the New Plastics Economy Accelerator Programme?

Being part of a pioneering programme that really believes in the circular economy with partners representing the many aspects of the system on the brink of change. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation is one of the few organisations getting its message heard loud and clear, and it creates hope for innovators like us out there that we will solve this.

STAY UP-TO-DATE

The New Plastics Economy Innovation Prize is led by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and was launched in collaboration with HRH The Prince of Wales’s International Sustainability Unit. The Prize is funded by Wendy Schmidt, Lead Philanthropic Partner of the New Plastics Economy Initiative.

Challenge partners

The Ellen MacArthur Foundation works in Education & Training, Business & Government, Insight & Analysis, Systemic Initiatives and Communications to accelerate the transition to a circular economy.

The New Plastics Economy is an ambitious, three-year initiative to build momentum towards a plastics system that works. Applying the principles of the circular economy, it brings together key stakeholders to rethink and redesign the future of plastics, starting with packaging.